Monthly Archives September 2010

We are excited to sponsor this weekend’s StartupWeekend in Austin, taking place at CoSpace! We are thrilled to be a part of this entrepreneurial event and look forward to attending and contributing to its success.

Startup Weekend is a combination hackathon and business plan competition. It is comprised of an intense 54 hours, starting with pitches on Friday night and wrapping up with presentations and live demos on Sunday evening. The demo’s are judged by a panel of some of our favorite local Austin entrepreneurs, including Jason Cohen, Josh Baer, Jonas Lamis, and Kip McClanahan.

Startup Weekend was founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde of TechStars, and is now run by Mark Nager, Clint Nelsen, and Franck Nouyrigat. The event has already met with success in over 52 cities, 12 countries, and growing! Read more about Startup Weekend here…

A few of our engineers, including @mrflip and @jessecrouch, will attend the event and contribute code. Any participants that are interested in implementing data from our API will have free usage of it for the weekend. We will also provide discount codes for use after the event.

Browser usage by the somewhat normal web

When one is scoping out a web project, one of the first requirements that a designer/web programmer will want to know is “what browsers are we supporting?”. The decision is usually led by a quick googling to find a page like the W3C’s which quickly tells you:

2010

IE8

IE7

IE6

Firefox

Chrome

Safari

Opera

July

15.6%

7.6%

7.2%

46.4%

16.7%

3.4%

2.3%

Over 30.8% of the browser world belongs to IE (much better than the way things were just a few years ago). Almost 15% of your users are using such an old version of IE that you may be tempted to code using IE6 or 7 as your least common denominator.

Browser usage by Infochimps users

Consider who is visiting your site though. Are your users more net savvy? Are they geeks? Here’s what our visitors use:

About 10% of infochimps.org users use IE, almost a third of the norm.
Half of our IE users use IE8 (a much more capable version of IE) leaving a meager 5% in the IE6/7 realm, which is split half and half (2.5% total IE6 users – again, almost a third of the normal).

Conclusion: Real nerds don’t use Internet Explorer

As far as design philosophy goes, we strive to design our sites (infochimps.org, api.infochimps.com) in a progressive enhancement fashion so that all browsers can be supported well (enough) and accessibility is simple and works. IE6 isn’t number one on our list of things to deal with.

When you have limited resources (like a startup), consider who is actually using your site before spending resources on that group.